Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri

Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri (born 1 July 1942) was the leader of the Iraqi Baath Party from 3 January 2007. He was formerly the Deputy Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council of Iraq from 1979 to 2007, when he became the leader of the Iraqi government-in-exile. Al-Douri commanded the Baathist army in the ISIS Offensive of 2014 in northern Iraq.

Biography
Al-Douri was born in Tikrit in the Kingdom of Iraq, the same birthplace as Saddam Hussein. He aided Hussein in executing the coup of 1968 and was made the Deputy Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council of the new Iraq in 1979, and served as a sort of right-hand man for Hussein, who became the dictator. Al-Douri escaped an assassination attempt on 22 November 1998 and was reluctantly allowed out of Austria after seeking treatment for leukemia in 1999.

In the Iraq War of 2003-2011, Al-Douri was responsible for leading Baathist resistance to the interim government and the NATO occupying forces, and not only did he fund the rebellion, but he also forged an alliance between the renegade Iraqi army and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Al-Qaeda, and other Islamist movements. He hid between Tikrit and the villages of Hawija and Dour, and Al-Douri owned a villa in the area. The Iraqi government was close to capturing him, but in 2014 he commanded the ISIS Offensive in northern Iraq, overunning Nineveh, Saladin, Kirkuk, and Diyala provinces.